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Plenty of Gun Owners Still Love Their Guns.

Yesterday I attended a jam-packed meeting of the MOMs
group and listened to speakers who delivered moving testimonies about how their
lives were affected by the violence caused by guns. Along with those presentations, the Chapter
leader also spoke about achievements of the past year as well as what lies
ahead. And this part of the meeting was quite upbeat, particularly when the
audience was reminded about the new #gunsense majority which now controls the
House.

But before my friends in Gun-control Nation decide that
the tide has finally turned, I think they need to step back a bit and consider
the possibility that their new-found success might turn out to be less than
what it appears. I’m not saying that because I want my gun-control friends to
fail. To the contrary, we must find a way to stop suffering from behaviors
which result in more than 125,000 deaths and serious injuries every year. We must. But it’s not going to happen until
and unless Gun-control Nation truly understands what they are up against, and
I’m not sure they do.

Ask the average gun-sense advocate why it’s so
difficult to pass laws whose purpose is to control gun violence while still
allowing Americans to own guns, and the answer you’ll get every time is one
variation or another on those ‘bad people’ who run the NRA. I heard this again and again at the MOMS meeting and I see it
on every #gunsense website – among Gun-control Nation it is simply assumed
without question that the NRA is the
‘enemy’ and that the NRA’s power and
financial influence needs to be stopped or at least curtailed.

There’s only one little problem. The NRA operates very much like the AAA; the latter provides services for
people who own cars, the former provides services for people who own guns. You
might think the NRA spends its time
and money lambasting tree-huggers and gun-control liberals in the public
square, but a quick glance at how the boys in Fairfax spend their money shows
this not to be true. For every buck the NRA dishes out to its legislative
allies in Congress, it spends two bucks on the care and feeding of its own
members, somewhere
close to $200 million a year.

The NRA claims
around 5 million dues-paying members, maybe they do, maybe they don’t. But the
organization’s real strength is that they speak not just for their membership,
but for everyone who owns a gun. Yea, yea, I know the gun-control groups claim
to be enrolling all those ‘reasonable’ gun owners to support their ‘sensible’
demands. I also claim to have stayed on
my diet during the Super Bowl.

Want to know what’s really going on in Gun-nut Nation? Take a look at NICS-FBI background check numbers which have just been compiled for 2018. I not only looked at those numbers but I compared 2018 to every year back to 2001, and this is what I found. In 2001, the number of new and used guns that were transferred across the counter of guns shops was 7.1 million, in 2018 it was 11.5 million, an increase of more than 50 percent. How much has the U.S. population increased over that same period of time? 16 percent. Here’s a little graph which shows the per-capita trend of background checks over the last twenty years:

The great jump occurred in 2013, the year after Sandy
Hook, when Obama tried, without success, to push through a gun-control bill.
And while the background check numbers have fallen off over the last several
years, they are still running nearly 60% higher than during the mid-years of
Bush #43. And remember who’s sitting in the Oval Office – the gun owner’s best
friend.

My friends in Gun-control Nation are certainly entitled to celebrate their growing effectiveness and strength; I saw it first-hand at the meeting of MOMS. But don’t forget – there are still plenty of Americans who believe in the importance and value of their guns.

4 thoughts on “Plenty of Gun Owners Still Love Their Guns.”

Plus, the gun control people are just pissing some of us off. In New Mexico, the universal background check bill doesn’t exclude anyone from a 4473. That includes people who have already paid out more than 200 bucks to obtain a concealed carry permit and who therefore have been comprehensively vetted by the State Dept. of Public Safety. Go figure.

Khal, the New Mexico requirement that a 4473 must still be filled out isn’t a big deal for most gun buyers, however, because they’d have to do a lot of gun trading to be truly burdened by it. Still with a CCW permit or permit to acquire, there could be more leeway. No law will be perfect, but plugging big BC loopholes should be the priority.

The GVP movement has a ways to go to get where they need to be. If they’re predecessors had not been so adamant on curtailing lawful gun ownership most gun folks today wouldn’t buy the NRA’s gun-grabber claims.

The writers of the NM Bill 8 made no attempt to reach out to gun owners to understand the existing situation. The 4473 requirement means two people with CHLs who have already been comprehensively vetted still have to drive to an FFL to fill out forms and pay a fee. That is stupid and the GVP folks don’t give a rat’s derriere. If you wonder why there is animosity, it is because people don’t care. And that includes both pro and anti gun people.